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Sunday, 19 February 2012

Maipo In Miniature

San Martin leads the Patriots
to a glorious victory
(c) Kaptain Kobold 2011

Many years ago I wrote a HOTT variant for fighting battles of the South American Wars of Liberation. After a couple of outings it's been sat on my hard disk gathering virtual dust, but back in November of 2011 we dragged it out and gave it another go.

It uses the HOTT mechanisms, but has its own troop types, and uses troop gradings to create variety within and between armies.

On Friday 11th November, 2011, a couple of us refought the Battle of Maipo (5th April 1818) using it. With each element representing 200 men, we had a Royalist army of 24 elements facing a Patriot one of 31 elements. Each army had two commands. The Patriots won, but then they always tend to; his is one of those battles you play twice, swapping sides and comparing final victories to see which player did the best. Unfortunately we only had time to do it once.

The next day I tried a smaller version, scaling the Royalists down to a conventional 12 element army, which gave the Patriots 16 elements. I also switched to the conventional HOTT shooting priorities to see how it affected the game (the variant uses .. a variant of those rules). What I got was a quick game of HOTT, and in well under an hour the Patriots won again, despite losing their general.

The Patriot army is larger, but about 50% of its infantry is Militia. It has a solid strike-force of Elite cavalry, though. The Royalists have no Militia infantry, and have some Elite Peninsular veterans as well, but their cavalry is all Militia. The Patriots also have artillery superiority, although in neither game did that count for much as they tend to be on the attack.

The figures are 6mm Napoleonics (mostly) from Irregular Miniatures, based for another set of rules. For HOTT I just use them on a 25mm frontage with a ground scale of 1/2" = 100p. This really makes for a small playing area.

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The Stronghold Rebuilt

Officially a blog about 'Hordes Of The Things', the excellent fast-play fantasy miniatures rules from WRG. But expect minor, and not so minor diversions into other games as well, as my grasshopper-like mind leaps from one cool thing to another.

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